If you stare at it too hard, "In Another Country," an exercise in drollery from South Korea's Hong Sang-soo, simply evaporates. But if you take the film as the bauble it is, you'll be entertained by its lighthearted wit, social observations and resolute sidestepping of profundity.

Hong offers three vignettes set in a boardinghouse in a seaside town. Each story focuses on a different Frenchwoman named Anne, all of whom are played by Isabelle Huppert, whose presence alone almost justifies the movie. Several Korean characters - along with situations and bits of dialogue - also recur.

Anne and the Koreans speak English to each other, and the film has fun with the characters' sometimes fractured language use. Especially amusing are the speech patterns of a local lifeguard (Yu Jun-sang), a large puppy of a man who keeps pressing Anne to visit his tent on the beach.

In the first story, Anne is a movie director and recipient of unwanted advances from a fellow filmmaker (Kwon Hae-hyo) who has a pregnant wife (Moon So-ri). Anne is a businessman's spouse in the second tale, where she's conducting an affair with a comically jealous Korean moviemaker (Moon Sung-keun).

The third story has Anne as a divorcee whose marriage was wrecked by a Korean woman. Anne's traveling companion, a Korean professor (Youn Yuh-jung), introduces her to a monk for advice that Anne finds useless.

There's a frame tale here - the vignettes are presented as the creation of a young screenwriter (Jung Yu-mi) whose family is having financial issues. Jung also plays a small role within the stories.

In all the vignettes, Anne searches for a lighthouse she's heard about. As with the sexual tensions and frustrations that keep occurring, and other links, hints and overlaps in the stories, the viewer may feel tempted to try to make more of them than Hong would deem wise.

They're not meant to be picked apart so much as to be observed and savored, like an agreeable dream.